Developer News - 22_CW13 - DMXControl Live Lights (April fool 2022)

As we reported a few weeks ago, we have made an important step forward in the development of DMXControl 3.3: The change into the beta phase took place. Now, slowly but surely, we would like to take a look into the future - namely at the following versions of DMXControl 3, such as DMXControl 3.4. As is well known, DMXControl 3.3 contains a very important module on the to-do list of our development team: The exchange of the entire network communication between kernel and GUI. As mentioned several times, this module is a very essential point for DMXControl 3 as a whole, because we would not have been able to implement long desired features and also some actually already long existing functions even in the short term or finally make them fly. Without this exchange, the further development of DMXControl 3 would have stopped at the end, because the old underlying system was also not developed actively for some time and in our context meanwhile often reached its limits.

Now that this important milestone has been laid with the exchange, various ideas that until now have only existed in our heads are coming within reach. One of these ideas was already born in 2018 during our annual meeting at Christian's in Upper Bavaria. By chance, the final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2018 took place in Lisbon on that Saturday. And with such a big show, it went without saying that we, as enthusiastic friends of lighting technology, followed the spectacle with at least one eye. From a technical point of view, this was also wonderfully possible thanks to the beamer and large screen. On top of that, we had also spruced up the room itself with a bit of show lighting. Stefan took the opportunity to visually transfer the big show in Lisbon to the small, tranquil village of Nußdorf am Inn and thus created a nice, live light show for all participants on site, even with the "small" technology. Exactly in this context the idea came up, if it wouldn't be exciting, if also other users of DMXControl 3 with their own light equipment could attend such events at home, at pack watching or completely different occasions. Another scenario would be to bring the light show from a club to your home this way.

An application example for DMXControl Live Lights: the Tomorrowland festival as a pack watching event in a club

Roughly speaking, the underlying concept would be as follows: On the one hand, there is the group of DMXC-LLLJs who provide a special show stream live with a defined show setup for a previously coordinated or announced event or from a club. But this show stream does not contain classic "dumb" DMX values. It rather docks one level earlier, namely before the HAL. Thus, the show stream contains the "intelligent" function values, which is known to be independent of the devices to be controlled and also their number. These data are provided accordingly by someone from the group of DMXC-LLLJs and are thus accurately adapted to the respective event or transfer club atmosphere into your home party cellar. On the other hand, there is the group of users of this platform. Here you only need a project patched with your devices. Via the “DMXC live lights” interface you then only assign the provided show stream to your device groups. A selection of single fixtures cannot be supported here. As soon as the show starts and your lighting PC is connected to the internet, all you have to do on this side is: lean back and enjoy the show.

But now we come to the question announced in the introduction text about your support or your opinion. In order to find out whether all this is just a crazy fantasy or whether this concept offers you any added value, we have once again prepared a corresponding survey in German. Among other things, we ask how you can get involved in this platform and would like to evaluate a few basic things to be able to assess the technical requirements before the start of the project.

You can find the survey again in our separate survey system under the following link: https://dmxc.org/livelights-umfrage. We would like to reach as many potential users as possible this way. Therefore, please feel free to share and forward the link. By the way, we have updated the system after the last survey about the livestream content, so any access problems are (hopefully) a thing of the past. The survey will be open until 10.04.2022 at 18:00.

We are looking forward to your feedback and are already very excited about the results!

Your DMXControl Team